Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  Soon after the Appeals Court decree, Fanny Giannatasio and her family visited Beethoven. “It was the first time we have seen him for a year,” she wrote in her diary. “I fancied he was very glad to see us. He seemed tolerably well, and at all events, he has a respite from the worries and torment of Karl’s mother. It pained me terribly to realize that all our relations with this highly-gifted being are to a certain extent ended . . . He made me a present of a new song of his, which gave me immense pleasure.”93

  The song was Abendlied unter’m gestirnten Himmel. It is a vision of the soul looking up at the starry night sky, where “no fear can torture it any more, no power can give it orders; with transfigured countenance it flies up to the heavenly light.” Fanny’s quietly regretful report of that evening is the last time she mentions Beethoven in her journal.

  29

  The Sky Above, the Law Within

  THE ROMANTICS SAID a genius is a person of a superhuman order who envisions and embodies worlds grander, more beautiful, more sublime, more terrifying than this one. Indeed Beethoven, by his late years already perceived as the quintessential Romantic genius, lived in another reality. Some territories of that reality were exalted, sublime, incomparably beautiful. Others were misanthropic, delusional, rationally and morally shabby. As an Aufklärer he believed in reason, while in his daily life he increasingly lost himself in unreason.

  Still, somehow he never entirely lost himself. To be an artist is to be wholly committed to the products of your imagination. Some products of his imagination did him great harm—in the end, far more harm to him than to anyone else. But they did not wreck his art. It may appear too easy to say that the darkness never polluted the beauty and the beauty never illuminated the darkness, but that seems to have been what it was with him. His worlds contained irresolvable contradictions, warring territories, but he kept the boundaries intact and survived it all.

  Toward the end of 1819, when he was still caught up in the legal wrangles over nephew Karl, in a newspaper he read a quotation from Immanuel Kant that riveted him: “There are two things which raise man above himself and lead to eternal, ever-increasing admiration: the moral law within me, and the starry sky above me.” These were perhaps the most celebrated words Kant ever wrote—they are inscribed on his tomb. In a conversation book Beethoven condensed this vision to its essence: “‘The moral law within us, and the starry sky above us.’ Kant!!!”1

  Like many things that inspire us, these words appeared when Beethoven was ready for them. They resonated with the whole of his life and music and helped point him toward the future. The important works of his middle years, starting with the Eroica, were largely humanistic: in rough terms, the conquering hero in the Third Symphony, the heroic individual in the Fifth. The Sixth Symphony and the Mass in C were steps toward a new sacred music, the Sixth more deistic in its sense of nature as divine revelation, the Mass in C a considered but provisional liturgical work. Now in his age, as many people do, Beethoven drew closer to God. As in all other things, he did it on his own terms.

  In those words Kant had drawn closer to the divine as well. For him and his time, the starry sky was the external raiment of God, who lives beyond the stars, watching over His perfect universe. As Haydn sang in The Creation, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” Kant’s philosophy notified humanity that as an infinite being, God was not available to finite human senses or reason, so here on earth we have to work out our happiness and morality for ourselves. As well as a humanistic moralist, Kant was a believer, so his words were personal for him: the moral law within me, the starry sky above me. For him God did not dictate moral law through scripture; rather the moral sense within each of us resonates with the unknowable but omnipresent divine order. The implication was the same in Beethoven’s reverence toward nature as the true scripture, the immediate revelation of divine grace and order. It was partly in that sense that in regard to their work, Haydn and many others of the time referred steadily to the “natural.” It was a matter of pursuing the rational and direct and unadorned, and in that way reflecting the divine order of nature.

  What seems to have caught Beethoven about Kant’s words was that kind of conception. The moral law within us, and the starry sky above us. His obsession with moral imperatives, with the necessity of personal goodness and the iron sense of duty that Kant and his time preached, was in these words unified with God in a radiant interchange stretching between the earth and the heavens. These ideas were going to be central to the Missa solemnis Beethoven had been working on for nearly a year now, and the exalted and exalting idea of humanity standing on earth and raising its gaze to the stars was going to be a familiar image in the music he was to write for the rest of his life.

  The gulf between Beethoven’s music and his life, the exaltation and the darkness, only widened in his age. His projects were more ambitious than ever as he won the court battle over Karl’s guardianship and directed his energies from his years-long legal struggles back to composition. In his daily life he remained as harassed, scattered, and earthbound as ever. His illnesses were more serious and prolonged, so more expensive. He was tumbling steadily deeper into debt.

  He had long since lost his fees for performing. The yearly stipend from his patrons was not enough to support himself and Karl. Publications and commissions were now a life-and-death matter. In his later years he wrote more letters than ever to publishers and patrons—courting, cajoling, pitching, selling, demanding, complaining. He had become frantic about money, ransacking his trunk for pieces to sell no matter how old or how slight, composing one “trifle” after another in hope of quick cash. This was in part a matter of relentless mathematics: selling publishers the massive works that most concerned him now, a gigantic mass and a gigantic symphony, could not earn him enough to account for the time they cost (though he always maintained a forlorn hope that they would). He had to pay for the big pieces with trifles, and with serious smaller ones like piano sonatas and string quartets.

  At least, with the guardianship settled, for the first time in years he could return to a semblance of routine in his work. Now he had a circle of friends influential in ways other than those of the aristocratic patrons he used to cultivate. If these friends could not shower him with money, they were ready to help out in other ways. He remained close to Karl Bernard, editor of the leading Viennese newspaper. Newer to the circle was Friedrich August Kanne, editor of the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, a composer himself, encyclopedically learned, writer of a history of the Catholic Mass, alcoholic, and something of a grand eccentric.2 Kanne and Beethoven consulted about the mass and about opera librettos; they had an ongoing debate about the emotional qualities of keys, which Beethoven believed in and Kanne did not.3 That Kanne was becoming an important music critic in Vienna did not hurt.

  Old friend Karl Peters, one of the first to write in the conversation books, remained in the circle. Beethoven had become close to lawyer Johann Baptist Bach, who helped him through the court case. He had finally befriended Joseph Blöchlinger, head of Karl’s school; amid endless discussions of the boy, they often played chess together.4 Among newer friends and sycophants were music publishers Antonio Diabelli, Sigmund Anton Steiner, and Tobias Haslinger, the latter an amiable young man who worked for Steiner. Beethoven was fond of Haslinger and amused them both with affectionate teasing. Beethoven regularly stopped by Steiner’s music shop on the Graben, where he could visit with local musicians and where hopefuls like the young Franz Schubert observed him shyly from a distance.

  Nearly all these men (Beethoven had no women confidants now) had some degree of expertise and influence in one area or another; all of them did him favors small and large. On the pages of the conversation books they could speak without worrying about prying ears. Politically they were progressive, which is to say that they hoped someday for the return of an enlightened emperor like Joseph II, or even Napoleon. In May 1820, Bernard wrote, “The whole of Europe is going to the dogs. N[apoleon] sho
uld have been let out for ten years.” The boyish jokes and naughtiness continued: Beethoven discreetly jots down his admiration for a passing woman’s backside; friend Janitschek teases him about trolling for whores and later cries on the page, “I salute you, O Adonis!”; Peters again offers his wife; Beethoven writes down the title of a French book on venereal diseases.5

  Later in a conversation book, writing in French for privacy, Beethoven gave a sad summary of his old relationship with the teenage Julie Guicciardi, whose parents broke up their courtship (if that is what their relationship actually amounted to): “I was loved by her, and more than her husband ever was . . . She was already his wife before [they immigrated ] to Italy—and she sought me weeping, but I rejected her . . . If I had wished to give the strength of my life to that life, what would have remained for the nobler, the better?”6 With no women available to him now but prostitutes and (if it was not all joking) friends’ wives for release, that idea was what he had retreated to, to armor his regrets. He had seized on Karl as someone to love, someone to love him. But with Karl he experienced family life mostly in its troubles, without the consolations of a wife who could understand and forgive him.

  The court decision giving him Karl’s guardianship was effectively final. Now the boy was largely insulated from his mother at Blöchlinger’s boarding school. In summer 1820, Johanna made a last, desperate appeal directly to the emperor, and the official papers survived. They provide a view into how much the authorities in Metternich’s police state knew about its citizens. The chief of the Royal Police and the Censor’s Office reported to Emperor Franz II, “It is evident that this boy, now 13 years old . . . ran wild to some extent under the influence of his uneconomical mother, who did not have the best reputation. For a year now, at his uncle’s expense, he has been in the private school of a certain Blöchlinger . . . His talent and his application are praised, and if he commits many thoughtless and youthful pranks . . . they are ascribed much more to his imprudence, combined with a passionate temperament and the habit of doing violence to obedience and decorum . . . than to ill will.”7 The emperor had plenty of reason to be suspicious of Beethoven—and his whole circle of liberals, for that matter—but he did not assent to Johanna’s petition. She gave up trying to get her son back, but she never did lose contact with him. Meanwhile if she had in part lost a son, she had a new, illegitimate daughter for consolation.

  Beethoven was desperate over money. Karl accounted for much of the drain, in addition to Beethoven’s old carelessness with finances and the expense of spas and medical treatment. He still did not spend on luxuries, though his wine bills were high.8 His habit of floating two or more flats at the same time still consumed a good deal of his income, likewise servants. His anxiety about money would never abate. Eventually some of his sketch pages were covered by numbers, obsessive financial figuring, written in long columns to be added up since he never learned to multiply. He composed more of the little piano pieces he called bagatelles, “trifles” intended for quick sale. At the same time he fell into the dangerous habit of promising unfinished, sometimes unbegun pieces to publishers who might give him an advance. There were other compromises. In 1819, he had directed Ries in London to try to sell a disjointed Hammerklavier: “Should the [Hammerklavier] not be suitable for London, I could send another one; or you could also omit the Largo and begin straight away with the Fugue, which is in the last movement, and then the Adagio, and then for the third movement the Scherzo—and omit entirely no. 4 . . . Or you could take just the first movement and Scherzo and let them form the whole sonata.”9

  In April 1820, he sent ten variations on national folk songs, eventually op. 107, to publisher Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn. He asked for 315 florins, telling Simrock, “I am not asking anything more for them since I have composed many of these trifles.”10 In another letter, he offered Simrock the enormous work he had only just set out on: “You will receive the Mass by the end of May or the beginning of June. So please remit the 100 Louis d’or to Herr F[ranz] Brentano, to whom I will send the work.” Franz, the businessman husband of Beethoven’s old friend (or lover) Antonie Brentano, was serving as middleman for some of his larger transactions.

  To help keep the Brentanos on his team, he dedicated the new op. 109 Sonata to Maximiliane, the couple’s piano-playing daughter. To Maxe he wrote a letter about it that was both sweet and disingenuous: “A dedication!!!! Well, this is not one of those dedications which are used and abused by thousands of people—it is the spirit which unites the noble and finer people of this earth and which time can never destroy. It is this spirit which . . . calls you to mind and makes me see you still as a child, and likewise your beloved parents, your most excellent and gifted mother, your father imbued with so many truly good and noble qualities.”11 To Franz he wrote, “I would like you to regard this work as a token of my lasting devotion to you and your whole family—but do not put any wrong construction of this dedication, by fancying that it is a hint to use your influence.” Perhaps, but he depended on Franz for his good wishes and, in his service as a go-between, his reputation as a businessman.

  Did Beethoven actually believe he would finish the mass this year? His old habit of excessive confidence about his output was accelerating—though at times in earlier years there appeared to be no limits to his productivity. Now if age and physical decline did not slow him down, deafness did. He could no longer work through pieces at the keyboard, so he had painstakingly to go through them note by note. Probably he was still feeling his way with the mass, did not yet envision its full scope. In any case, before long he took to deliberately misleading publishers about works in the pipeline.

  To add to his endless annoyances, another portrait painter showed up wanting him to sit still. This one was Joseph Karl Stieler, from Munich. He had been engaged in making pictures of great men, his catches including Goethe (for a painting eventually as famous as his Beethoven). He was also responsible for the notorious Gallery of Beauties, portraits of thirty-six women who had captured the eye of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Stieler was, in other words, a successful artist for the high-placed, appreciated for turning out flattering images.

  Stieler’s portrait shows Beethoven in a grape arbor, holding a manuscript and pencil.12 The manuscript is labeled “Missa solemnis in D♯” (the strange key name was the German indication for D major). Here Beethoven is fierce and indomitable, his head tilting forward so he looks upward past the viewer, rapt in his genius. Stieler tidied up not only his subject’s ungovernable hair but also his clothes and his face. This person is a roughly handsome, well-dressed man, which the actual subject was not. For the next two centuries Stieler’s painting endured as the ultimate Romantic image of Beethoven—which is to say, an icon in the cult of genius.

  That spring of 1820, Beethoven sent a note to one of the prime architects of the myth that was forming around him: the critic, composer, and fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose 1813 articles on the Fifth Symphony had placed Beethoven once and for all among the Romantic demigods. Hoffmann’s name had come up in the conversation books: “In the Phantasie-Stücke by Hoffmann,” somebody wrote, “you are often spoken of.” This elicited one of Beethoven’s puns based on the meaning of the writer’s name: “Hofmann [sic] you are no hope-man.” By now Hoffmann had reached the summit of his fame with his tales of doppelgängers and automatons and other delirious fantasies. If he had not done so already, Beethoven perused the critic’s writings about himself and probably sampled the tales as well, and sent off a letter of thanks. It was a tip of the hat from a living myth to his prime mythologizer: “I am seizing the opportunity . . . to approach a man so full of life and wit as you are—Also you have written about my humble self. Also our weak Herr Starke [another pun: Stark = ‘strong’] showed me some lines of yours about me in his album. Thus I am given to believe that you take some interest in me. Allow me to say that this from a man with such distinguished gifts as yourself pleases me very much. I wish you everything that is beautiful and go
od.”13

  Meanwhile Beethoven had seized a new publisher, or rather two related ones. He sold Continental rights to twenty-five Scottish folk songs (op. 108), first arranged for Thomson in Scotland and now revised, to the house of Adolf Schlesinger in Berlin. The publisher’s son Moritz ran an allied company in Paris. When the variations were dispatched he sketched some more piano bagatelles, which were a steady concern of his in these days—small pieces to be sold in sets. At the same time he agreed to write three new piano sonatas for Schlesinger. That commitment he kept. Though he was working away at the mass, between this summer and the end of 1821, the only major pieces he completed were the sonatas for Schlesinger, opp. 109–11. All three live among the legends of his late works.

  In rural Mödling in the summer of 1820, his various initiatives continued, some of them trivial, some underhanded, some (the piano sonatas) with splendid outcomes. As always he rambled the hills and woods and gorges, sometimes with visitors. As he stood with his editor friend Bernard on a viewpoint looking out over the landscape, Bernard wrote in a conversation book phrases that must have echoed in Beethoven’s feelings and fantasies: “One feels quite a different person in the country . . . Let’s found an Institute for philology, philanthropy, poetry, and music here in Mödling—and have that cook to cook for us!”14

  In autumn a Dr. Müller, visiting philologist from Bremen, noted like most visitors that Beethoven went on about “everything, the government, the police, the manners of the aristocracy, in a critical and mocking manner. The police knew it, but left him in peace either because he was a fantastic [i.e., crazy] or because he was a brilliant artistic genius.” Likely there was one more reason the police let Beethoven alone: in dealing with an artist adopted by Archduke Rudolph, brother of the emperor, the police had to proceed with caution. If Beethoven was aware that his connection to Rudolph gave him a certain umbrella of protection in a repressive state, he did not appear to notice it. But unlike the fate of so many in Vienna, there was no record he was ever harassed or even visited by the police.